Events

Mobile payments in the spotlight

Mobile payments are achieving rapid adoption, becoming one of the major drivers of such developments is the gaming industry.

August 30 2013

about 3 minutes read

After this year's Gamescom, it seems that mobile payments are continuing to achieve rapid adoption, and one of the major drivers of such developments is the gaming industry, the centrepiece of the event.

Our Infobip team spent a productive time at this global gaming conference in Cologne, meeting with publishers, developers, m-wallet and payment providers who all provided profound insight into the future of the m-payments ecosystem.

East Asia leading in monetisation of digital goods

The event has shown clear signs that Japan is still one of the prime mobile payment markets when it comes to virtual and digital goods. Merchants in developed East Asian countries are among the leaders in monetising mobile content, with users happily and regularly paying and conducting countless mobile transactions. At the same time, many apps and mobile content producers in Europe and North America struggling to monetise are now increasingly adopting mobile payments and mobile commerce.

The overall value of mobile payments industry is set to increase by 44% through 2013 and that major growth is anticipated to maintain high rates until 2017. Infobip mobile payments continued to follow that trend, showing an annual coverage growth of 120%. Simplicity of the end-user payment experience and high conversion rates for in-app payments make for strong advocates for continued growth as a sustainable business model.

In-app buying should be as simple as possible

The gaming industry has specific needs in terms of mobile payments and is paying particular attention to solutions that smoothly integrate into their software and the actual game flow for the end-user. It’s imperative that integrating (another) payment option doesn’t affect the gaming experience and that in-app buying during play is made as simple as possible. In that respect, direct mobile billing is certainly an intuitive, desirable option to be offered to gamers across the world.

The wide coverage we provide was an extremely hot topic, as well as technical capabilities, in house development and excellent support provided to our customers. Many of the people we met saw significant potential in our complete package of services and solutions and saw Infobip as a perfect match for gaming companies, so we came back from Cologne with high hopes plus a vast number of opportunities to develop.